Stumpy Brown | Ngupawarlu – My Country

Stumpy Brown | Ngupawarlu – Women’s Law Story

Senior law woman Nyuju Stumpy Brown (1924- 2011) was a custodian for her ancestral site at Ngupawarlu in the Great Sandy Desert. During her art career spanning from the 1980s until 2008 she recreated the desert sites that she knew from her childhood, focusing on the Dreaming stories that belong to Ngapawarlu.

Stumpy Brown developed her skills with other painters at Fitzroy Crossing, painting mostly for the first decade using acrylic paints on paper. The layers of washed colour became a trademark of the painters from the region, and Stumpy Brown used colour as freely as any of the Fitzroy artists. Stumpy Brown laid down blocks of colour in diluted layers which she then built up and blended with adjoining colours. The sweeping motions led to the creation of the waterhole surrounded by desert Sandhills and ultimately to the re-creation of the Ngupawarlu story.

Stumpy Brown was part of the great desert exodus that saw the traditional owners of desert country moving north along the Canning Stock Route into Balgo and the Fitzroy River area of the Kimberley. The desert people brought their strong cultural values with them and many artists like Stumpy Brown continued to celebrate and connect with the ancestral country they had left behind. Aboriginal art status – Collectable artist.